Red
by misspadfootjnr
Summary: Born into a world of alcohol and violence, Clary feels as though she's at war with everything around her; including herself. When Jonathon is released from prison, and Clary strikes up a friendship with the blonde boy in English, life suddenly becomes livable again - until local schoolboy Max Lightwood is murdered, and everything Clary thought she ever knew is shattered.


**_A/N - Anything you recognise belongs to Cassandra Clare. New Brooklyn is not a real place, merely a town that I created for the purposes of TMI in London (please excuse the unoriginality, I was trying to keep it closest to canon as can be when set in another country)_**

 ** _Enjoy!_**

* * *

 **PROLOGUE**

 _ **Christmas Eve 2000**_

 _ **New Brooklyn Council Estate, East London**_

* * *

Christmas lights flicker outside flat 203, their feeble glow tinging his fair hair with orange. He knocks on the door. Two knocks, three knocks, four; no one answers. He yells something - a name maybe - but it's hard to tell from his drunken slur. Still, no one answers. He pounds on the door again, with his crutch this time, and then there's a crash from inside the flat and his heart wrenches as –

" _Daddy_!"

He fumbles for the doorkey hidden beneath the yellow plant pot, and turns it in the lock with trembling fingers. It is quiet inside, unnaturally so, but he can hear her; her delicate chanting of 'mummy, mummy, mummy...'

He's hobbling as fast as he can down the hall, the disjointed tap, tap of his crutch echoing about the flat — but he can't move fast _enough_. Light is streaming through the agape bathroom door into the lonely darkness, and so he pushes through the pain until he reaches the small room... What he finds is enough to snap him back to sobriety. His knees give way beneath him, and the entirety of the surrounding estate can hear the scream that escapes him – guttural, filled to the brim with despair and disbelief and pain. All he can see is her pale skin and the pool of blood that blossoms like crimson petals across the linoleum floor, her massacred wrists that hang limply at her sides. There's a knife there somewhere; one of the sharp ones from the kitchen drawer that sits just a little too high out of the children's reach. Her eyes are open yet unseeing, makeup smeared across her stone cheeks. It seems like eternity that he kneels there, her head in his lap and her auburn hair in his hands. He doesn't notice the girl with the red plaits that tugs desperately at his clothes, doesn't notice the sirens that wail in the distance, or the men and women in uniform that begin to fill his home. He doesn't notice, or he doesn't care.

It seems like eternity that the girl with the red plaits crouches there, hands shaking and mind reeling as she tugs at the hem of her father's coat. Everywhere she looks is red; blood coating her hands, the floor, her mother. She doesn't cry, doesn't speak or  
shout or whimper. The girl with the red plaits just crouches there, silent and staring, until the woman in the black uniform leads her away from the scene. The woman is kind, wraps a blanket around her shoulders, holds her hand as they sit in the police car.  
She smells of lavender, and coffee, and _sympathy_. The girl with the red plaits pushes her away. She doesn't want _sympathy_. She just wants them to take it all away.

* * *

When they arrive at the station and the kind woman hands her a polystyrene cup, she finally breaks her resolve. All the voices and questions and noises build up until her head starts to hurt and blood rushes in her ears. She barely realises when the  
scalding liquid cascades over her arms, barely feels the pain, and doesn't care. Her knees give way and she can no longer breath; suddenly she's on the floor, bloody fingers tearing at her throat and her hair, limbs shaking as she gasps and sobs.

That's all that the girl with the red plaits can remember from that night.

The screaming and the despair and the scalding milk, the tears and the blood.

Red.

* * *

 _ **A/N - So, a year and a half after I initially posted this story, I have edited this for the third time, and hope to actually continue into a multichaptered fic this time... Third try lucky, eh? Anyway follow and review and whatnot, and I'll check out some of your work. Constructive criticism is welcomed (and much appreciated) but please, no flames, because I am a real person behind this computer screen. Thank you!**_


End file.
